Let’s take a look at why digital asset management is important. You'll be surpriced how poor digital asset management impacts your company operations and drains your marketing budget. We will also show you that with the right DAM solution in place, you'll actually save money and time.
Time thieves in digital asset management
There are several time thieves at a workplace. Without a proper system that can act as a home for your brand, it is easy to end up with messy and unstructured solutions or lack of solutions for that matter, that will eventually lead to time thieves. Here’s a list of typical time thieves related to your brand management:
Searching for assets
Without a proper system, brand assets are easily scattered all over the place. Just attempting to search for assets is not only a pointless activity, it is also time consuming In addition, you have to take up your colleagues' time when you don’t know the location of assets that you might need right away.
Lost assets
Without a system, assets are easily lost. And the results of that is that employees are spending futile time looking for assets that can not be found.
Re-creation of assets
There can be many reasons for re-creating assets. Maybe the designer has left the company and the assets were located on his or her computer or hard drive. Whatever reason, it will consume needless time on creating new assets. Why spend time creating the wheel when it already exists?
Old assets and material in circulation
Use of old logos and assets may cost more than you can imagine. Just think of the time wasted when you must recall a campaign or launch of a brand? Not to mention the damage inconsistent and wrong use of your brand does to your brand identity.
The hidden costs in asset management
Regardless of what industry or job you have, there will always be hidden costs. But how significant are the costs in marketing? And how does it impact the efficiency of your marketing inititatives?
What do we use the marketing budget for?
Percolate conducted a study where over 300 enterprise CMO’s, VP’s and Marketing Directors participated. The study shows that only 48% of the actual marketing budget is spent on advertising. So where does the rest of the money go?
Percolate found that the rest is spent on assets, legal expenses, marketing technology, collaborators, design and salaries. The most interesting hidden costs here are design and assets that often occur because the company do not have a proper digital asset management solution.
Adaption
The costs that are not considered in the equation is the time spent on adjusting asset sizes, formats, language adaptation and last but certainly not least, the amount of time and costs related to adapting material to different channels or platforms.
Ineffectiveness
Maybe the biggest cost of them all are lost files. On average a marketer will look for assets at least 16 times during a work day. In 35% of the cases, without finding them. Total waste and unnecessary time consumption that could have been used on value-added marketing activities instead.
Double work
The second an asset needs to be re-created you can start multiplying the cost by two. The same goes for the time, resources and expenses that are spent on campaigns that need to be withdrawn because the wrong material was used.
Cost examples – this is the costs of asset management
Your employee earns 20$ an hour. The employee spends an average of 5 hours a week looking for a file. This amounts to 400$ a month looking for one file. Then 5 employees are looking for files, this is 2000$ down the drain every month.
Or how about when you can not find the original file for your brochures or other costly material, and you don’t know what agency created them? This is literally money down the drain and it will cost at least the same to create new material.
Why digital asset management is important
With a proper digital asset management solution saving time and money is easy. It gives you complete control of your digital assets and provides user-friendly workflows that enables everyone in your company to be efficient and streamline their activities - without involving everyone else. Digital asset management basically eliminates the time thieves and hidden costs discussed above.
A all-in-one storage system
By collecting everything in one place with simple and intuitive logic, you will save time that is often spent searching. With easy access for employees and partners you secure seamless workflows – for everyone involved.
Digital asset structure
For the ones responsible for the brand and associated assets, a Digital Asset Management system will ensure smooth management that doesn’t consume more time than necessary.
Improve company collaboration
A huge advantage with a proper Digital Asset Management solution is the availability and automatic workflow it brings. The solution allows you to share your digital assets with ease which leads to less requests and emails about assets. Additionally, you secure a user friendly and around the clock availability for everyone in your organisation.
Predefining file formats and types
Any designer will appreciate this. Predefining file formats and file types saves an enormous amount of time. The designer only has to upload one file, whereas the system flexibility will ensure availability in different variants. The designer avoids an inbox full of requests for small adjustments as the employees are self-served.
Decreased time-to-market
With everything prepared and ready to go there will no longer be any bottlenecks that normally occur because you have to wait for the designer or the marketing department. Delivering necessary assets on time is easy. Locate and download in 1-2-3.
If you need additional proof to be convinced, there are plenty of data to back potential cost-savings. Truth is, a DAM-system is a time and expense saver for any company, but you have to think about the investment long-term.
Check out our whitepaper to learn more about what digital asset management is.